Katie Lanning

Katie Lanning

Katie Lanning

Associate Professor

Department of English · Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Lindquist Hall 637
Campus Box 14

Overview

I am an associate professor of English at Wichita State, where I specialize in eighteenth-century British literature and the history and technologies of the book. I received my PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016. I am the Undergraduate Studies Coordinator for the English Department at WSU, as well as the faculty sponsor for WSU’s chapter of the English honor society Sigma Tau Delta. 

Academic Interests and Expertise

Education:

  • Ph.D. in English, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2016)
  • M.A. in English, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2010)
  • B.A. in English and International Studies, Southern Methodist University (2008)

Research Interests:

  • eighteenth-century British media and culture
  • history and technologies of the book
  • early history of the periodical
  • serial and ephemeral literature
  • history of detective fiction and crime writing
  • digitization and access
  • GIS mapping, literature, and place

Areas of Research Interest

  • eighteenth-century reprinting
    • volatility of reprint formats, economic competition, and notions of literary canon in the eighteenth-century print market
    • unexpected modes of production, circulation, and use of eighteenth-century texts
  • detective fiction and crime writing
    • changes in genre before, during, and after development of police force
    • eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prison writing and convict transportation narratives
  • digitization and access
    • searchability and use of digitized eighteenth-century texts
    • reading practices across time periods and formats

Areas of Teaching Interest

From medieval werewolf poems to digital audiobooks, I love teaching students about the vast and varied world of English literature and the histories and technologies that make literature possible. My courses are often interdisciplinary in nature and invite students to work with spaces like WSU Special Collections or Wichita’s Museum of World Treasures. 

Courses I teach regularly include:

  • English 277: The Detective Story
  • English 323: World Literature
  • English 360: Major British Writers I
  • English 374: Literature in the Audio Age
  • English 378: Technologies of the Book
  • English 524: Restoration & 18th-Century Literature (18th-Century Media Course)
  • English 590: Senior Seminar
  • English 700: Introduction to Graduate Study
  • English 712: Graduate Studies in Fiction
  • English 724: Restoration & 18th-Century Literature

Publications

  • “Reading ‘Rotennness’: Jonathan Swift and Textual Error.” Special Issue “Error and the History of Imperfect Reading” for Hunting Library Quarterly.  Forthcoming.

  • “Ali Baba in the News: Systems of Seriality in George Parker’s Newspapers.” Eighteenth-Century Theory and Interpretation. Volume 63, Double Issue 3-4, pp 245-265.
  • “Coconut Music.” The Rambling. Spring 2022.
  • “Local Attention: Putting Melbourne on the Map in Fergus Hume’s Mystery of a Hansom Cab.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 54, no. 6, December 2021, pp. 1331-1354.
  •  “Social Distance in the Long Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth-Century Theory and Interpretation, Special Supplement: “Scholarship in a Time of Crisis,” Fall 2020.
  • “Scanner Darkly: Unpopularization in the Burney Newspaper Collection.” Archives and Records, vol. 41, no. 3, 2020, pp. 215-235.
  •  “‘Fitted to the humour of the age’: Alteration and Print in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 26, no. 4, Summer 2014, pp. 515-536.
  • “Tessellated Texts: Reading The Moonstone in All the Year Round.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 45, no. 1, Spring 2012, pp. 1-22.

Book Manuscript in Progress:

  • Volatile Forms: Reprinting Literature in the Eighteenth Century

Reviews:

Forthcoming:

  • “Gone Girls: Transportation in Female Convict Narratives.” Displacement in Texts of the Long Eighteenth-Century. Edited Collection. 

Professional Experience

  • 2023-present: Producer for KMUW podcast, Marginalia 
  • 2011-present: American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS)
  • 2015-present: Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, & Publishing (SHARP)
  • 2015: Rare Book School (“Book Production and Social Practice in Early Modern Europe and America”)
  • 2019: Digital Humanities Summer Institute (“Geographical Information Systems in the Digital Humanities”
  • 2019:  Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis Workshop (“Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for the Humanities and Social Sciences”)
  • 2021: Rare Book School (“Textual Connected Histories: Books and Reading in the Early Modern European World”)

Areas of Service

  • 2020-present: WSU Retention Faculty Fellow
  • 2019-present: Faculty Sponsor, WSU chapter of Sigma Tau Delta
  • 2019-present: Faculty Advisor, WSU Society of Cosplayers